Turbo – film review

A touching, evocative animation about a tragic snail, voiced by Ryan Reynolds

At the screening of the 3D animation TurboI went to, small children were cooing and reaching out with their hands as if to touch its star, a tragic snail (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) who longs to go faster and escape his life mooching among rotten tomatoes in the veg patch. The film has ripples of such sorrow, and keys perfectly into being young and little. A scene with Turbo gazing out from a bridge over a motorway at midnight, awed by the whizzing lights and sounds, really feels like something genuinely remembered by one of the animators from childhood. Only a four-year-old – awake in a car way past bedtime, overhearing adults talking in the front of things they don’t understand, watching the lights whip by in the darkness – can feel that a motorway is actually glamorous. There’s a nice grown-up dig at doping in sport too. Turbo sucks on “Adrenalobe”, an apparently banned substance, and his eyes take on the stripped-back steel of a Lance Armstrong.